Longtime wrestler and wrestling promoter Jerry Jarrett died this Tuesday at the age of 80. Perhaps better known to younger fans as the father of “Double J” Jeff Jarrett—who still performs regularly in All Elite Wrestling in his mid-50s—Jerry enjoyed a legendary six-decade career in wrestling. Over that span, Jarrett went from 14-year-old ticket vendor to undersized good-guy wrestler to Memphis-based booker and matchmaker to Tennessee territory owner to longtime Vince McMahon collaborator to, finally, the man who established the first legitimate national promotion to challenge the World Wrestling Federation in the wake of World Championship Wrestling’s collapse and sale. Along the way, he stage-managed the rise of notable stars like Jerry “the King” Lawler and Jim Cornette, created story lines and wrestling-match types that WWF and Extreme Championship Wrestling would later popularize, and even offered his territory as the proving ground for the bad-guy “Mr. McMahon” character that would help save McMahon’s company during the Monday Night Wars.
That might sound like a lot, and it’s not even the half of it. But long before his creative mind shaped multiple eras of professional wrestling, Jarrett was merely a scrappy, undersized son being raised by a single mother in Nashville, Tennessee—a kid whose parents divorced when he was 3, at a time when divorces were extremely uncommon. Jarrett’s mother, Christine, affectionately known as “Teeny,” sold tickets to wrestling events at the Hippodrome for regional wrestling promoters Nick Gulas and Roy Welch. Jarrett was selling programs by the age of 7 and promoting smaller Nashville-area wrestling shows by the age of 14—which entailed everything from renting venues to building the ring.
Despite working every weekend, Jarrett still found time to become an honorable-mention all-conference halfback for Nashville West High School at a mere 145 pounds, his name and gridiron accomplishments filling the sports pages of the Nashville Banner through 1959. He also found time to play baseball and basketball at West. It was this prodigious work ethic that initially drew Jarrett into the business world. He worked for the Murray Ohio Manufacturing Company, a bicycle and lawn equipment company, for several years and—at least according to wrestler Steve Keirn—played a role in inventing the extended “banana seat” popular on 1960s and 1970s bicycles (Cornette, who broke in as a manager under Jarrett, has also discussed this claim but could offer no independent verification of it).
Jarrett eventually left Murray to rejoin Gulas and Welch; he worked as an office bookkeeper, learning the back end of the business, before beginning to referee matches. Interested in entering the ring, he pestered stocky Hawaiian-born heel Tojo Yamamoto to train him; Tojo grudgingly agreed, despite reservations about Jarrett’s size—Jarrett claimed in an interview to weigh around 195 pounds by this period, though videos from the time suggest he was probably lighter. The bulk of Jarrett’s training was provided by Sailor Moran, a legit tough guy whom Jarrett compared to Stu Hart; that training would come in handy during a particularly vicious encounter at the peak of Jarrett’s own in-ring career.
The Jarrett of this period looked like the spitting image of his son Jeff, or at least Jeff early in his own late-’80s career, before he had discovered supplements and the weight room. In his autobiography, It’s Good to Be the King … Sometimes, Lawler described Jarrett as “the most over babyface wrestler there’d ever been in the Memphis territory” up to that point. “He was the first good-looking young guy who pushed hard and promoted”—the territory was mostly the province of horse-faced bad guys and hard-nosed old veterans—“and the girls went crazy over him.” Partly because no one knew he was married, Lawler observed, Jarrett was “so over it was unreal … like a rock star.” This appeal was not lost on Jarrett, whose star diminished slightly, per Lawler, after it was revealed to the crowd in Louisville—the Kentucky city where Jarrett’s drawing power was unmatched—that he was absent for a particular event because his wife, Deborah, the daughter of wrestler and longtime business associate Eddie Marlin, had given birth.
Jarrett and Lawler took that lesson to heart; the former crafted handsome good and bad guys whose marital statuses were left up in the air, and the latter went so far as to play it coy about the paternity of his own aspiring-wrestler son (which, in turn, led to a memorable Memphis angle involving Lawler and Brian Christopher). During his run at the top, Jarrett began booking Memphis for Gulas, who took a percentage of the gates that Jarrett drew, and gradually built Lawler, an illustrator and radio DJ, into a main attraction who could supplant aging stars like Jackie Fargo.
Along the way, Jarrett developed interesting new match types, like the scaffold match—two wrestlers fight atop a scaffold, and the winner is the one who isn’t knocked off—which would later be used by Jim Crockett Promotions at Starrcade ’86. Midnight Express manager Cornette blew out his knee when he tumbled off the scaffold during the Starrcade co–main event. Jarrett wasn’t able to find many takers for that particular match format, which he had devised while watching gladiator B movies, and eventually booked himself into it against Don Greene, who wound up taking the plunge.
After gaining additional experience as a booker in the Atlanta territory, Jarrett grew increasingly concerned about the state of the Gulas territory. According to Lawler, Nick Gulas had begun using his tall, somewhat ungainly son, George Gulas, as a major attraction even though George didn’t have sufficient training to perform in the role, and gate revenues were declining accordingly.
Jarrett had already been perceived as a threat by Gulas’s business partner Roy Welch, who dispatched aging bad-guy wrestler Mario Galento to threaten Jarrett during a mid-1970s match between Jarrett and Lawler. As described on an episode of VICE’s Tales From the Territories, Galento attacked Jarrett during the match, and Jarrett responded as Sailor Moran had taught him, jamming his finger into Galento’s eye and pulling it out. Lawler—who was forced to defend his opponent—later cut a promo explaining that only he got to beat up Jarrett, which justified why, after the eye hit the mat, he proceeded to batter Galento with a nightstick he had brought ringside, nearly closing Galento’s other eye.
Keirn explained that Jarrett put a premium on knowing how to handle oneself in the ring. “One time, when I was walking down the hallway [in the Mid-South Coliseum with Jerry], he put his hand on my back,” Keirn said. “I knew from my time with [Florida promoter] Eddie Graham that when someone put their hands on you, they were preparing to push you off a cliff, so I whipped around and underhooked Jerry. Jerry nodded and explained that he was indeed trying to teach me the lesson Eddie had already taught me.”
Jarrett prided himself on doing what was best for business. In 1977, working in conjunction with top attraction Lawler, Jarrett seized Memphis—shrewdly switching the top-rated wrestling program from one local Memphis network to another and bringing the on-air talent with him—and several other cities from Gulas, whom he worried would bankrupt the entire wrestling business in the region by overexposing his son, George. Lawler jumped at the opportunity to receive an ownership stake in Jarrett’s Continental Wrestling Association, which would ultimately consolidate the entire territory when Gulas had to close his territory three years later. Jarrett would subsequently fend off a challenge from the International Championship Wrestling promotion run by the Poffo family—father Angelo and his sons, Randy Savage and the recently deceased Lanny—before bringing the trio into the CWA, where matches with Lawler and other CWA stars drew large crowds that put Randy and Lanny on the radar screen of McMahon and the expanding WWF.
As Jarrett’s in-ring career wound down, his behind-the-scenes creativity picked up. He and Lawler turned television comedian Andy Kaufman into a full-fledged wrestling star; Kaufman had a feud with Lawler that spanned several months and received major national media attention (wrestling writer Bill Apter claims that he had Kaufman call Lawler to talk about bringing Kaufman to Memphis wrestling TV; Jarrett said that Kaufman called the CWA office directly). Among the various other great managers he developed in Memphis, Jarrett turned Jimmy Hart, once a chart-topping musician with the Gentrys, into a heat-seeking mouthpiece capable of generating intense crowd reactions for any number of bad guys under his supervision.
Jarrett and Lawler pioneered wild, hard-core slugfests like the 1979 Tupelo, Mississippi, post-match concession-stand brawl in which Lawler and Bill Dundee—looking to pop that town in the midst of a minor promotional war with the Alabama-based Fuller brothers—hurled condiments and destroyed a popcorn machine while battling Wayne “Honky Tonk Man” Farris and Blond Bombers teammate Larry Latham; such stunts preceded Paul Heyman’s groundbreaking ECW work by nearly two decades. Or, going in the opposite direction but prefiguring the various “cinematic matches” that would appear in the 1990s and eventually during the early COVID-19 era, there was the equally unusual “empty arena match” between Terry Funk and Lawler in 1981. Previously run-of-the-mill performers like Austin Idol and James “Sugar Bear” Harris were also rebranded as “the Universal Heartthrob” and “Kamala, the Ugandan Giant,” respectively, and were presented as major threats to “King” Lawler’s Memphis throne.
Keirn was one wrestler among many who benefited greatly from Jarrett’s skill in crafting larger-than-life wrestling personas. After successful runs in various territories, including a hot Florida story line that involved Olympic wrestler Bob Roop and Keirn’s real-life Vietnam POW father, Keirn—who would later wrestle in the WWF as Everglades gator wrangler Skinner in the early ’90s—arrived in the CWA in 1981 in need of a change of pace. Jarrett, inspired by music videos he had seen on MTV, developed a gimmick for Keirn that would define an entire generation of copycat hot-dude, rock-and-wrestling teams, ranging from the Rock ’n’ Roll Express (also developed by Jarrett and Lawler) to the Rockers.
With regional star Fargo’s in-ring career essentially at an end, Jarrett wanted to keep his “Fabulous” sobriquet in circulation. So he paired Keirn with “Sweet” Stan Lane, another well-built, blond wrestler with a five-o’clock shadow (Terry Taylor was initially considered, but he was dropped because Jarrett thought he looked too much like a good guy). He bedecked them in sequins and tights and shot sexy rock videos showing them in tight jeans. These “Fabulous Ones” had Fargo’s seal of approval to carry on his arrogant strutting and taunting antics, albeit updated for the 1980s. These two ripped, masculine guys, who came down to the ring to the tune of Billy Squier’s “Everybody Wants You,” were an immediate hit, and they would go on to hold Jarrett’s AWA Southern tag team titles 15 times from November 1982 to October 1985.
“Jarrett is one of the all-time wrestling geniuses,” Keirn said. “The style that I had wrestled pre-Memphis was strictly NWA—it was pretty much the same style. For the average person, in my day, every place you went, you had to adapt your semi style to where you were at. Everywhere pre-Memphis, even Japan, had mostly wrestling and minimal color. We told stories in the matches. We knew the story and told it within the time limit. There was very little entertainment in those territories. It was strictly wrestling style. I was stuck in that style. I had to loosen up as far as my entertainment side. In Tennessee, I learned to strut, react to my audience, feed my audience, get them emotionally involved, make it as exciting as possible because you have to bring them 52 times a year to the same cities. You had to give them a $3 show worth 100 bucks just to make them come back next week for something different.”
The Fabulous Ones were a top earner in Memphis, making thousands of dollars per week from a combination of match payoffs and—another Jarrett innovation—concession-stand merchandise sales. “He combined videos, music, and psychology to turn two technical wrestlers into flashy superstars,” Keirn said. “JJ was the sole creator of the Fabulous Ones. … JJ could run a puppeteer operation—he could handle five to six kinds of characters or talents, program them all at once. That was a bit different from having everyone do primarily a wrestling style. He’d have the Fabs over here, working this style, like the Fargos, we’re patterning our style on theirs, trying to imitate it. Then he’s got Bobby Eaton over here, he has him doing his thing. Lawler, doing his style. … He prepped me for the WWF character work [as Skinner and, on a few occasions, Doink the Clown].”
What Keirn continuously stressed was the sheer number of wrestlers like him who had been repackaged by Jarrett. Indeed, in 1993, as Jarrett’s career in Memphis extended past the end of the territorial era, he was even instrumental in offering his territory to Vince McMahon so that he could try out his evil “Mr. McMahon” gimmick, the rich New York–based wrestling promoter attempting to embarrass Lawler and his Memphis wrestling fans.
In fact, as McMahon prepared for a possible exile from the WWF if found guilty of supplying steroids to wrestlers in his federal trial, Jarrett—who had become a confidant—found himself in line to run the company in his absence. “When Vince was looking to step away, he extended that offer to Jarrett—but it was for Vince’s benefit, not Jerry’s, because Vince knew that Jerry could keep it going,” said Keirn. Jarrett said in an interview that, given his dislike for the American Northeast, McMahon also knew that he would have no interest in remaining in Connecticut for the long term. (It didn’t matter anyway, as McMahon never had to step away from the federation.)
As the 1990s drew to a close, Jarrett stepped back from day-to-day promotion. In 1995, he sold his promotion—renamed the United States Wrestling Association to reflect the fact that it also promoted shows in the Dallas territory formerly run by Fritz Von Erich—to Lawler. He thereafter worked as a consultant for both WWF and, with McMahon’s blessing, the WCW; McMahon hoped its demise would be hastened by large payments to Jarrett and others.
Before the WCW’s sale to WWF in 2001, Jarrett had been trying to assemble the funds and investors needed to purchase the company. When that failed to materialize, he and son Jeff—a big star, but one who had angered McMahon when Jeff demanded a large payoff to drop the Intercontinental Championship at the No Mercy pay-per-view in 1999—raised the funds needed to launch NWA-TNA in 2002. In practical terms, this would give Jeff a place to headline since Paul Heyman’s ECW had also closed its doors in April 2001 and WWF now had no large domestic competitor.
NWA-TNA, which still operates today as Impact Wrestling, was initially envisioned as a company that would generate revenue through weekly PPVs (Jarrett even wrote a book laying out the business model). However, by October 2002, Dallas power company Panda Energy had purchased a controlling stake, and Dixie Carter—daughter of Panda founder Bob Carter and a longtime acquaintance of Jeff Jarrett—became president in spring 2003. Increasingly upset with this arrangement and at odds with his son, Jerry left the promotion in 2005 and didn’t mend fences with Jeff until a decade later.
However, Jarrett’s legacy, in Keirn’s opinion, was not one of acrimony and dissent. “He didn’t die with people disliking him,” Keirn said. Thankfully, this includes Jeff, whose signature strut, wrestling style, and entire career reflect Jerry’s influence. Indeed, Jeff exemplifies, in a single performer, how great Jerry’s impact on the business has been: He is essentially Jerry Jarrett with muscles, a great wrestling mind capable of running live shows and also—as I learned when I interviewed the WrestleQuest video game development team last year—executive-producing an entire story line–driven role-playing game.
But there are so many performers like Jeff, all of whom owe their careers to Jerry’s tutelage. WWE, AEW, and every other wrestling promotion use his innovations and, in most cases, personnel who trained under him at some point in their careers. Even wrestlers he admittedly couldn’t turn into main-eventers, like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and the Undertaker, passed through his doors. “He helped so many people make a living in this business,” said Keirn. “You’re who the promoters make you.”
Oliver Lee Bateman is a journalist and sports historian who lives in Pittsburgh. You can follow him on Twitter (@MoustacheClubUS) and read more of his work at oliverbateman.com. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.